I decided to get a TESmart 2 Port Dual Monitor KVM Switch for my setup. Previously, I used a single ultra-wide monitor with two PCs (work and personal) sharing the same keyboard and mouse. I would have to manually switch every device whenever I switched PCs. Now, I added a second monitor and this KVM switch. I can push a button (or use a keyboard shortcut) to easily switch all my devices between my two PCs. I love it! Not only do I now have more screen real estate, but I don't need to waste time switching workspaces.

We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs > Fixits give me that early-career feeling back. You see the bug, you fix it, you ship it, you close it, you move on. There’s something deeply satisfying about work where the question isn’t “what should we do?” but rather “can I make this better?” And you get to answer that question multiple times in a week. A good reminder that we sometimes need to take a break from introducing new features and improve what we have.

Introducing Kagi Assistants \| Kagi Blog > Kagi’s Research Assistant happened to top a popular benchmark (SimpleQA) when we ran it in August 2025. This was a happy accident. We’re building our research assistants to be useful products, not maximize benchmark scores. I continue to be more impressed by Kagi Assistant as I use it. While not a full replacement for something like ChatGPT or Gemini, it certainly gets the job done. I think the results are drastically better simply because of the cleaner and more relevant search results that Kagi provides.

Books, hardware, games, articles, videos, and interesting links I've collected recently.

I picked up From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks after a Bookworm podcast recommendation. It's essentially about finding fulfillment and happiness in later life. Since I'm well into this stage of life myself, the book caught my attention. It helped that both podcast hosts gave the book a 5-star rating (out of 5 stars). The first chapter of the book talks about our inevitable professional decline. Every high-skilled profession goes through it, and it usually occurs between the late thirties and early fifties. I hadn't given much thought to my "professional decline" until now (thanks to reading this first chapter), and now I want to prepare myself. While decline is noticeable in physical jobs, such as sports, where older bodies don't perform as well as they did in their younger years, it also affects other jobs that require mental effort, including knowledge work. We know our bodies decline as we age, but our minds do too! Research indicates that the prefrontal cortex begins to decline in function as we age. We get mentally slower and more forgetful, among other things. I certainly noticed this with myself. It's tougher to work long hours, and I require more effort to focus, while in the past, I wouldn't be distracted by an elephant running through the cubicles. Of course, there are benefits to being older. I assume we combat this "professional decline" by leveraging our accumulation of knowledge and experience. This chapter doesn't address this, but perhaps it will be discussed later in the book. Another point the author made that stood out to me was that the more success we achieve in our younger years, the more difficult it will be to let go of that success as we age. It becomes less likely that we will ever achieve the same things we did in the past, and that can be difficult to handle. Ouch. That hits home. So, the book starts with a downer. I'm optimistic that, as I continue to read, I'll learn ways to shift my skills to what I'm better at as I get older. I feel like I'm in a good position to do so. As a software architect/engineer, my experience is what sets me apart.